6 niche business ideas using information marketing

How to profit from what you already know

With information marketing you get to sell information products based on what you already know and other people want to find out. You’ve already learned the lessons, all the the ins and outs, you’re just putting a price tag on the understanding that you’ve built up. We all know how good it feels to think you’ve got a head start. I’ve learned that focusing on what you know gives you that head start.

The great advantage of this sector is how easy it is to get into. Production costs are low, you can work from home and no shipping is required – often all you have to offer is a download button. This is the definition of easy to scale.

The impact of information marketing on the rest of your business

Make information marketing a standalone business or use it to supplement your main business.

Information marketing is a great way to demonstrate your expertise. Your knowledge and experience shine a light on the rest of your business. Even if your main business has nothing to do with offering information, when you publish a related ebook or promote consulting services you’re adding credibility to everything that you do. You establish yourself as an authority in the market and your business becomes the company people turn to for the last word in advice. And we hope the place they go to buy.

Free information sites

A well understood business model on the internet is to give away information that people want to search for. Aim to publish in-depth reviews and analysis, interview experts, provide data in new formats. Of course it always helps to publish regularly like I’ve been doing lately :) What you’re doing with a free information site is creating a focused audience that you can market to. There may be possibilities to expand into related products and future developments too. The free information is the attraction that draws people to your site. As you might expect it’s the advertising (or other offering) alongside that builds your revenue stream.

The best example is Google itself. It has built a business around helping people search for the free information they’re trying to find.

Selling access to specialised information

Do you know things so valuable that people will pay to find out? If so it may be possible to market this information on your own site or find a company hiring experts to create specialised reports giving private access.

If you don’t have all the answers in your head perhaps you could collate many sources of information to create one place that people want to go. The information you’re selling does not have to be exclusive. The value you’re adding is compiling a database that’s more readily accessible.

Good examples of this business model are Consumer Reports and Which? They’ve built their success around charging for private access to reviews and test results.

Consulting

If you can build a strong reputation in any field you could consider setting up as a consultant. The beauty of the internet is that even with a very narrow skillset you can offer consulting services that cater for a narrow niche. Popular areas include servicing major websites (such as setting up an ebay shop, organising Pinterest boards or Facebook advertising), internet-related subjects (such as basic internet skills for particular user groups) or conducting a typically offline service using internet communication (such as online psychotherapy).

You can gain a taster in consulting using sites like elance.com or fiverr.com. An alternative approach would be to manage a website where you offer the services of other consultants for a suitable fee.

Teaching

While a consultant usually works one on one, an online teacher can reach classes of thousands of students. Generally the threshold for teaching experience is low and the best-selling instructional materials are targeted at beginners. There may well be an area of your expertise which is very suitable for a teaching course.

If you have marketable skills and the ability to present yourself well you can create a course by assembling a collection of videos and e-books. You can either make this material available on your own private site, via email or tap into an existing system through sites such as Udemy. Udemy lets you set yourself up as a teacher straight away and handles the billing and administration as well as providing access to a pool of customers.

You’ll find many private sites across the internet offering courses alongside their main business, such as the Blogging Success Foundation course.A useful tip to identify whether your skill is marketable is to search Google for ‘how to’ followed by the skill – if people are searching for it then there’s a market.

Selling virtual products

Virtual products are one of the least expensive ways to get started with online sales. A digital product can be distributed directly to the customer over the internet with nothing more than a download button. It might take time to create your product but when you’ve sold the first copy you still have the file to sell again. This is such a popular route to an online income that there are many plugins and companies dedicated to helping with billing and administration, e.g. WP-Invoice (which I haven’t tried, and there are many others to choose from).

Myths you might have heard…

Quick Riches? – overnight success does not happen… often.

Fast money? – laying the foundation takes time.

You Don’t Need Your Own Products? – you can make money selling affiliate products but for complete control you have to create your own.

Don’t choose a competitive niche? – the more competition then the harder to get traffic, but if it’s competitive it also means there must be a huge demand.

We each prefer to consume information in one style over others. This means you should consider the format of your information product for the target market. Perhaps a simple change of format from written text to podcast is all it takes to open up a whole new market. The list of formats is endless so juggle these around to see what best fits your aims: video, text (which itself can be broken down into many formats including PDF or Kindle), subscription newsletters, private access to areas of a website.

It seems there’s a download button on every site you visit. To make your offering stand out you must consider the format that your visitors would most appreciate.On the other hand I recall a job interview with a company that presented all it’s online information in PDF format because this is what its current clients preferred. But this left no juicy keywords for Google to find. The company couldn’t understand why it failed to appear in the search results.

Publishing books online

The internet has opened up a huge interest in independent publishing. In the past there were few ways to publish a book. Large publishing companies had almost exclusive access to the market. Online publishing tools such as Amazon Kindle didn’t exist. The public tended to see self-published books as lower quality. Now that perception has largely disappeared.

20 or 30 years from now, there’s going to be some gizmo that kids carry around in their back pocket with everything in it – including our books if they want.

Michael S. Hart (1998)

Now you can create a digital version of a book and sell it directly to customers through online retailers such as Amazon. You don’t need to pitch an idea to a publisher or print up thousands of copies. You’re free to write about what interests you for even the smallest niche. With ‘print on demand’ services from companies such as CreateSpace or Lulu you can have your book printed only as it’s ordered.

You can find ebook publishing in almost every sector of the internet. A good example to consider is Ryan Bidulph’s Blogging from Paradise ebooks which amounts to a huge volume of work that he distributes like a factory line on Amazon.

Information marketing comes in many forms so browse through these choices before you decide on your final route.Begin with examining the nature of the information that you want to share. Decide whether it would be more attractive to consumers in one chunk, such as a single ebook, or spread over a series of articles. Complex information may require more interaction from the customer, possibly better suited to a course or consultancy to tailor the product to their needs. You must also consider your own presentation preferences. If you’re daunted by the thought of teaching to a large group then all you have to do is start small. Perhaps your skills are in one-to-one communication across Skype? Or perhaps you’re skilled at writing?Whatever your skills, knowledge or limitations you can probably find a product that takes account of them all somewhere across the range of information marketing. Of course above all you’re looking for the format that’s most attractive to the customer.

I can’t believe something that should be as straightforward as selling up should have caused such havoc! If I even think about blogging a disaster happens, it’s like a curse :)

I could see a lot of sense in all of these ideas but if you look at this site the direction I’m moving in is free information with virtual products alongside. I see publishing books online as an extension of the virtual product offering but it does take a bit of time (as most things seem to for me at the moment…).

Welcome back and enjoyed this post. You gave some wonderful examples here and much to my surprise included a link to my little ole site. The consulting model works wonders by the way.

I do believe that giving away valuable and helpful information is what can draw the right people to you. From there you can only help so much with free information. Those that are dead serious about continuing to move forward will gladly pay the price it takes to acquire more information or purchase a product or service that will help them move forward. That’s the beauty of the internet because using this particular model builds trust and we all know we prefer to work with those we trust.

Thanks for sharing these examples and I’ll be sure to pass them along as well. Welcome back and hope your week goes well.

Hi Donald, Your article really does point out that information marketing goes well beyond plain old blogging. There are so many avenues for creating an online business – the only limitation is your own imagination.

The most difficult hurdle and where most people give up is getting the momentum going and building up the traffic. So, learning through people that have been there/done that and are offering information through any of the channels that you mentioned is a great place to start.

Thank you so much for mentioning me on your wonderful blog and putting me in the company of such industry icons as Carol Amato and Adrienne Smith – so honored!

Hi Donald, It was wonderful to read your post. Now whenever people want some information, they do search on Internet. They are loaded with relevant information on hundreds of websites related to that query. Information marketing is great way to start a business if you have sufficient information and you can deliver it properly. You have explained how to find ideas for niche step by step and precisely. Thanks for sharing with us. With regards, Saurav

The internet has certainly made it easier for us all to research into areas we would never even have known about. I think your point about being able to deliver it properly is important – there’s so much information out there it’s a great help to people to be able to put it in a format that they can understand.

A bit about me

Hi, I'm Donald. My background is in ecommerce, web design and photography. I'm interested in how to get more out of the web. This blog is aimed at sharing ideas for you and your business too. I hope you find something good to take away!